11:15 AM

  Natalie Holcombe had been looking for the exquisite man since the first test had ended.

  She’d been thinking about him for longer than that. Really, since the moment she’d first id eyes on him as he and the rest of his team was navigating the mostly empty parking lot. He’d spent the entire test in the boiler room—their fuel expert according to the tall man with grey hair named Ed. She’d have made a beeline for the boiler room if duty hadn’t kept her in the main control room.

  Natalie took her job seriously. It was a serious business, bringing power to an entire nation. But the test had been mundane. Boring almost. Except for the mysterious fuel that had driven the process, it was like many other tests. What notes she’d taken were few, and equally boring. It had given her time to daydream about the man named Harry.

  “He’s pretty tired,” she heard one of the researchers say as she approached the group that stood around, or sat in, their van.

  “He looks tired,” someone else said.

  When she got close enough she could see the topic of their discussion curled up on the back seat, sound asleep by all appearances.

  None of them had ever seen Aric like this. But he’d never spent three hours using his powers without a break, and they still didn’t really know what his limits were, or if he even had any. Delphine and Edith’s faces were mirror images of concern for him.

  But his breathing seemed even, his face peaceful.

  “I’d need a nap too if I spent the past three hours like that,” Alex said.

  “Like what?” Natalie asked as she stopped by the group. She gnced at the beautiful sleeping man and smiled. It was a look that everyone in the group recognized immediately.

  Carlos pegged her around forty, give or take. Pretty, but not stunning. Not slim, but carried herself like someone who knew exactly who she was—and didn’t waste time wishing she were someone else.. He’s seen countless women look at Aric in just that manner. He was getting almost as used to it as Aric was.

  He wasn’t vain—he knew what he looked like. But still, there were moments he wished women would look at him like that. Just once. The thought fshed in his mind a second before he looked at Carol, and remembered that someone did look at him like that.

  Everyone from Surrey was searching their minds for a response to the Safety Inspector’s question. They’d reviewed a lot of the cover story on the ride over, but they never figured out anything better than “the details on the fuel are proprietary.”

  “He was handling the fueling,” Carol spoke finally. “It’s a bor intensive process.”

  “Do both of you work for the American company that developed it?” Natalie asked. Why else would there be two Americans at a shutdown British power pnt. Plenty of old coal fired pnts in the States. Why run the test here? Because they didn’t want to blow up one of their own pnts?

  Typical Americans. Why blow up your own country when someone else’s will do?

  “We work together,” Carol said.

  Natalie’s ear wasn’t too refined, but she’d immediately picked up on the pronunciation that the two yanks shared. That habit of dropping trailing Rs, the horrendous way they treated some of their vowels. Natalie knew enough not to pry. They’d either share the details on their proprietary fuel or they wouldn’t. But it wouldn’t be her they shared it with. It would be the people in CEGB HQ that got those details.

  “Is he alright? I just stopped by to say thank you to him.”

  Sure you did, almost everyone else thought in some variation.

  “He just needed a nap,” Edith said. “He’ll be ready for the next test.” That test was pnned for just after 1 PM. Time for lunch, and a vigorous discussion on how this new fuel would bypass the boiler systems and LNG gas burners and run the turbines directly.

  Natalie had a feeling that she’d be collecting a much more detailed list of notes before that test was allowed to proceed, gorgeous man or not.

  Aric was tired at the end of the first test. More tired than he’d been in a while. He never burned that long before, taking in whatever it was something was giving him and then changing it into something else, something he could use to do...almost anything he chose. His celestial candy bar, a quick source of energy. A rapid high followed by a gradual low.

  But this had been longer than anything he’d tried before. Much longer. Flying from Surrey to Sommerbridge had been the longest thing he’d done nonstop, and that had only taken an hour. He’d been winded after that, but nothing like this. His head hurt, and everything had a green tint when he looked at it.

  “Come lie down for a bit,” Edith had said when he reappeared from the boiler room—Brian still at his side, looking at Aric like her father might’ve looked at George Best.

  Aric gave her a wilted smile before turning to speak to the man who was two decades older than he was. “It was good to meet you, Brian. A pleasure working with you.”

  “Likewise, Harry. Likewise,” he said as they shook hands.

  She linked her arm in his as they walked slowly across the barren parking lot. Aric’s back was damp, almost wet. He’d sweat through his shirt in several pces. His hair was damp as well.

  “Let’s find you something dry to wear, shall we?” she asked.

  “Can we find me something to eat too? I’m famished.”

  He’d almost finished his lunch, cheese and pickle sandwich from the canteen, before starting to nod off. They sat in the van, the doors open to allow some fresh air to flow through. Aric was wearing a borrowed t-shirt, none of them having even considered the possibility that the strain might affect him in this way. She’d collected the wrapper and pte which he took as his cue to simply fall to one side and tuck his hands under his head. He was asleep almost immediately.

  “How is he?” Delphine asked. It was rare to see her without makeup. If she wore any now, Edith couldn’t see it. Her hair was done in a simple knot, a long pin made from jade and gold keeping it in pce. She wore dark scks and a blouse that matched the jade, and gold earrings. Her heels were not the longest pair she owned. Edith couldn’t imagine a setting where the woman would not stand out. Delphine had compined about her feet, and the curse of high heels, a few weeks earlier. Aric had stopped next to her and said something that only the two of them could hear. Whatever it was, Delphine’s face broke into a bright smile. She moved to the nearest chair and slipped off her shoes. Aric brought another chair next to her and, starting with her left foot, took it in his hands and began to massage it. Even from across the room Edith could see his hands glow. He repeated the process on her right foot, Delphine’s face shining in an ecstasy of relief as the pain melted away.

  She walked with renewed vigor now, the rhythm of her heels in the b hallways quickened. But right now she was motionless, her gaze alternating between Aric and Edith.

  “He's pretty tired,” Edith answered.

  “He looks tired,” Hank said.

  And then everyone turned—as the Safety Inspector from CEGB HQ came striding toward them, notepad in hand, looking far too interested.

  It had been a quiet morning for everyone stationed in control rooms 2 through 4. All eyes—especially those of the CEGB reps—had been on Pnt 1. Hank and Alex listened to the voices from CR1 just like the three men who still, for now at least, worked at Croydon B Power Station.

  Both leaned heavily on: “Don’t know, mate. The Americans brought it. It’s all Greek to me.” That excuse worked well enough when questions of fuel came up—a luxury Carol didn’t have in CR3.

  In CR4, the young maintenance tech had chatted up Delphine so much his mates finally asked him, in no uncertain terms, to pipe down. Once silence reigned again, their conversations mirrored those in the other control rooms.

  “Did you see a tanker deliver fuel to One?”

  “Not since we got here. Maybe it came early? Cover of darkness and all that?”

  “Why? What are we gonna tell from the outside of a tanker?”

  “Dunno, mate. The Americans brought it. It’s all Greek to me.”

  That refrain carried into lunch.

  Brian had been the only one with a front-row view of the “fueling” process—and he still wasn’t sure what he’d seen.

  “He was glowing,” he said. “And there were these streams of light coming off him.”

  “Right. Don’t tell us. They pay you off or something? Slip you a few quid to keep your mouth shut?”

  “I’m serious. And I could have sworn that I heard music.”

  “Did he sing to you?”

  “No, I mean music. Real music symphony like.”

  “Keep it up, mate. They’ll have you on drug testing for sure.”

  But not everyone was ughing. Trick of the light, maybe. But there’d been stories tely—odd stories. Things people couldn’t expin. Some of them not too different from what Brian was describing. And it was the Americans that built the bomb, wasn’t it? Maybe they’d built something new. For NATO, maybe.

  The canteen, never famous for its haute cuisine, was running under-staffed these days. It served the crew tasked with shutting the pnt down—or today, starting it up again. But they still made an effort. Corned beef hash with baked beans or fried egg. Cottage pie, Toad in the hole, Chips.

  Gordon and Wendy were absent, but everyone else was seated across two long tables. They rarely ate together back in the old days, when the control rooms ran at full tilt.

  “Tariq, you see anything?” someone from Three asked.

  Tariq shook his head. “Nothin’. Steam came in, turbine rolled up, everything looked normal.”

  “No talk about this fancy fuel? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “That French bird was out of the ordinary,” Colin Digby from Four said with a grin.

  “That French bird was out of this world,” Marcus Redfern from Three said.

  Anjali from Four let them down easy. “She’s got her eye on that Harry bloke. Don’t need specs to see it.”

  Shirley Bains from Three tried to cover up the fact that she’d been daydreaming about Harry all morning. “He’s alright, I guess. Looks a bit like Gregory Peck when he was young.”

  “My mum loved him in The Keys of the Kingdom. Said if our vicar looked like that, she’d be at church every day.”

  “I can only do what I believe is right,” one of the ds said, in a passable Peck impression.

  The table ughed.

  Gordon and Wendy’s lunch, by contrast, was much less rexing.

  “So he’s not just a hopped-up petrol station attendant,” Gordon said, “he’s also an expert in running steam turbines without steam?”

  Ed Martell chose that moment to tell the truth—or at least, part of it.

  “Frankly, I have no idea what his abilities are or how far they reach. What I can tell you is that for this test, he’s critical personnel. Without him, there is no second phase.”

  Natalie had heard enough phrases like proprietary information and the Americans didn’t share that with us to st a lifetime. One more, and she might scream bloody murder.

  “If he’s critical personnel, he should be here expining what comes next,” she said. “I know he wore himself out powering this morning’s test, but we have questions. What safety systems are in pce? Is he qualified to spot if something’s going wrong? And most importantly—how exactly does he pn to run steam turbines without any bloody steam?”

  “We’re relying on your safety systems,” Ed replied evenly, “and your staff’s expertise. If you don’t think they’re up to the task, we can call it now—say thank you very much, and drive home. We’ll write up what we have and send it to CEGB HQ.”

  It was a calcuted move. The send it to HQ part hit exactly where it needed to. No one in the room wanted a failed test. And half a test was still a failure.

  But they had a right to ask. The trouble was, Ed didn’t know the answers. Because the truth was, he had no idea what Aric was going to do next.

  “No one I know’s ever heard of a Harry Morgenstern,” Gordon said. “And he’s still pretty green. He didn’t pick this up at your college. Surrey’s not known for an energy program, far as I know.”

  Ed shifted smoothly from truth to innuendo.

  “He came to us from one of the alphabet agencies. We’re not sure which.”

  A spook, Gordon thought. I bloody knew it. We’ll never learn what this fuel is.

  A spy, Natalie thought. I could date a gorgeous spy.

  “So what are we doing, then?” Wendy asked, turning to Don MacAllister. “He’s not sharing cssified details—and HQ knew that when they signed off on the test, didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know what HQ knew,” Don admitted. “They might’ve gotten a cssified briefing. Either way—they greenlit the test. Dr. Martell’s right. All our standard safety systems are live, and we’ve got the full day shift on watch. Nearly twenty staff. Close to three hundred years of combined experience. We can handle this. Let’s proceed.”

  Ed smiled. “Music to my ears, Mr. MacAllister. I’ll let my team know.”